Roxton, that little red town under a June sky, looked like a ruby strung
upon the silver thread of a river and set in a green hollow of the
hills. As yet the enterprising builder had not stamped the mark of the
beast glaringly upon the place, and the quaint outreachings of the town
were suffered to dwindle through its orchards into the June meadows,
where the deep grass was slashed and webbed with gold. The hills above
were black with pine thickets that took fire with many a dawn and
sunset, and to the north great beech-woods hung like purple clouds
across the blue.
The most miserly of mortals might have warmed with the ridge view from
Marley Down. Southward a violet haze of hills, larch-woods golden spired
in glimmering green valleys, bluff knolls massive with many oaks, waving
fields, blue smoke from a few scattered cottages. From Marley Down with
its purple heather billowing between the pine woods like some Tyrian
sea, the road curled to the red town sleeping amid its meadows.
Mrs. Betty Steel was at least an æsthetician, and her eyes roved
pleasurably over the woods and valleys as she drove in her smart
dog-cart over Marley Down. She had been ridding her conscience of a
number of belated country “calls” with a friend, Miss Gerratty, beside
her, a plump little person in a pink frock. There was a certain cottage
on Marley Down that Betty Steel had coveted for months, an antique gem,
oak panelled, brick floored, with great brown beams across the ceilings.
Betty Steel had the woman’s greed for the possession of pretty things.
The house in St. Antonia’s Square seemed too large and cumbersome for
her at times. Perhaps it was something of a mausoleum, holding the ashes
of a dead desire. Often she wearied of it and the endless domestic
details, and longed for some nook where her restless individualism could
live in its own atmosphere.
A glazier was tinkering at one of the cottage casements when Mrs. Betty
drove up the grass track between sheets of glowing gorse. A pine wood
backed the cottage on the west; in front, before the little lawn, a
white fence linked up two banks of towering cypresses. Mrs. Betty drew
rein before the gate, and called to the man who was releading the
casement frames.
“I hear the cottage is to let. Can you tell me where Mr. Pilgrim, the
owner, lives. Somewhere on the Down, is it not?”
The man, an unpretentious, wet-nosed creature, crossed the grass plot,
wiping his hands on a dirty apron.
“Mr. Pilgrim’s just ’ad an offer, miss.”
“Has he?”
“Well, we’re doin’ the repairs. I ’ave ’eard that Mrs. Murchison of
Roxton ’ave taken it.”
“Dr. Murchison’s wife?”
The man nodded.
“How utterly vexatious. I suppose Mr. Pilgrim would not sell?”
“Don’t know, miss, I ’ain’t the authority to say.”
Parker Steel’s wife flicked her horse up with the whip and turned back
to the main road, a woman with a grievance. Her companion in pink
offered sympathy with a twitter. Being of the Steel faction, she was
wise as to the friction between the households, and a friend’s grievance
has always an element of wickedness for a woman.
“How very annoying, dear!”
Mrs. Betty waved her whip.
“I have had that cottage in mind for over a year. Some one must have
told the selfish wretch that I was after it.”
“Strangely like spite, dear,” cooed the dove in pink.
“I wonder what the Murchisons want with the place? To make a summer
beer-garden for their brats, perhaps.”
“Marley Down’s so bracing. I hear Jim Murchison has been overworking
himself. Probably he intends spending his week-ends here.”
“Rather curious.”
Miss Gerratty’s blue eyes were too shallow for the holding of a mystery.
“I can’t see anything strange in it, Betty. Jim Murchison has that
assistant of his, a finnicking little fellow in glasses, with a neck
like a giraffe’s. Strange that they should have snapped up your
particular cottage.”
“Oh, that’s just like Kate Murchison,” and Mrs. Betty’s brown eyes
sparkled.
Hatred, like love, is a transfiguration of trifles, and nothing is too
paltry to be registered against a foe. Parker Steel’s wife drove home in
the most unenviable of tempers, untouched by the scent of the
bean-fields in bloom, or by the flash of the river through the green of
June. She rattled down the steep hill into Roxton town at a pace that
made Miss Gerratty wince. Metaphorically, Betty Steel would have given
much to have had her bit in Catherine Murchison’s mouth, and to have
treated her to a taste of her nimble whip.
Leaving Miss Gerratty at the end of Queen’s Walk by the old Jacobean
Market-House, Mrs. Steel drove home alone, to find some half-dozen
letters waiting for her, the mid-day post that she had missed by
lunching with Mrs. Feveril, of The Cedars. She shuffled the letters
irritably through her hands like a pack of cards, her eyes sparkling
into sudden vivacity as a foreign envelope showed among the rest. The
letter bore the Egyptian Sphinx and pyramids, and the familiar writing
of a friend.
The letter lay unopened in her lap awhile, as she sat by the open window
of the drawing-room and looked out over the beds that were gorgeous with
the flare of Oriental poppies. The lawn, studded with standard roses,
swept to the trailing branches of an Indian cedar. Rhododendrons were
still in bloom in the little shrubbery under the rich green shade shed
by two great oaks.
She tore open the envelope at last, having lingered like one who shirks
the reading of news long waited for. The familiar squirl of the man’s
handwriting made her smile, bringing back memories of a first serious
_affaire de cœur_ with the quaint grotesqueness of the foolish past. She
remembered the thin, raw-boned youth with the red mouth and the
strenuous eyes who had kissed her one night after a river-party. He was
still vivid to her, even to the recollection how his boating-shirt had
slipped a button and given her a glimpse of a hairy chest. What a little
fool she had been in those days! Mrs. Betty was not the slave of
sentiment, and Surgeon-Major Shackleton had slipped with his somewhat
strenuous love-making into the past. She still had occasional letters
from him, and from other sundry friends, letters that she always showed
her husband. Parker Steel was not a jealous being. He was mildly pleased
by the conviction that he was still envied in secret by a bevy of old
rivals.
“Dear Betty,—”
Mrs. Steel made a little grimace as she pictured the number of “dear
Betties” who had probably drifted within the sphere of Charlie
Shackleton’s passion for romance. She skipped through the letter with
watchful eyes, ignoring the surgeon-major’s bantering persiflage, the
familiar gibes of an old friend. It was on the fourth page that she
unearthed the news she delved for, tangled beneath the splutterings of
an execrable pen.
“I think you asked me in your last letter whether I knew a
fellow named Murchison at St. Peter’s. Haven’t you mentioned
‘the creature’ to me before? I remember Jim Murchison just as
you describe him, a solid, brown-faced six-footer, one of those
happy-go-lucky beggars who seem ready to punch creation. I left
the place two years before he qualified; he had brains, but if
my pate serves me, he was the sworn slave of a drug we catalogue
as C_{2}H_{5}OH. Not a bad sort of fool, but bibulous as
blotting-paper. Funny he should have turned up your way, and
married Kate of the golden hair. Mark this private, and let my
friend Parker deal with the above formula. Glad to hear that he
is raking in the guineas—”
The letter ended with a few personal paragraphs that Mrs. Betty hardly
troubled to read. She crossed the hall to her husband’s study, hunted
out a text-book on chemistry from the shelves, and proceeded with much
patience and deliberation to unearth the scientific hieroglyph the
surgeon-major’s letter contained. She found it at last, and smiled
maliciously at its vulgar triteness.
“C_{2}H_{5}OH, ethyl alcohol; commonly known as alcohol; a generic term
for certain compounds which are the hydroxides of hydrocarbon radicals.
The active principle of intoxicating liquors.”
Mrs. Betty put the book back on the shelf, and buttoned Mr. Shackleton’s
letter into her blouse. There was a queer glitter in her eyes, a
spiteful sparkle of satisfaction. She went back to the drawing-room, and
seating herself at the piano, played Mendelssohn’s “Spring Song” with
fine verve and feeling.
Her husband found her in a brilliant mood that night at dinner. She
looked sleek and handsome, blood in her cheeks and mischief in her eyes.
Mrs. Betty at her best could be a very inflammatory and sensuous
creature, like a Greek nymph taken from some Bacchic vase.
“The latest news, Parker—the Murchisons have snapped up my cottage on
Marley Down.”
“The dickens they have! You don’t appear jealous.”
“No, I have a forgiving heart. The place is like a hermitage. What can
the Murchisons want with such a cottage?”
Her husband, cold intellectualist, warmed to her beauty as to true
Falernian.
“Am I a crystal gazer?”
“Read me the riddle.”
Parker Steel laughed, and looked at her with a slight loosening of the
mouth.
“Riddle-de-dee! You women are always analyzing imaginary motives.
Murchison has been looking run to death, lean as an overdriven horse. I
don’t blame him for wishing to munch his oats in rustic seclusion.”
Mrs. Betty bubbled over with sparkles of intuition.
“What does C_{2}H_{5}OH stand for, Parker?”
“C_{2}H_{5}OH! What on earth have you to do with chemical formulæ?”
“Answer my question.”
“Gin, if you like; the stuff the blue-ribbonites battle with.”